From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Dec 31 11:34:10 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id AE76237B401 for ; Tue, 31 Dec 2002 11:34:08 -0800 (PST) Received: from mail.nbusa.com (mail.nbusa.com [207.225.231.20]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3EE6E43EC5 for ; Tue, 31 Dec 2002 11:34:08 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from mwimpee@nbusa.com) Received: from mwimpee (mwimpee [10.1.1.60]) (authenticated bits=0) by mail.nbusa.com (8.12.6/8.12.6) with ESMTP id gBVJXW42056434 for ; Tue, 31 Dec 2002 11:33:32 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from mwimpee@nbusa.com) X-RAV-AntiVirus: This e-mail has been scanned for viruses on host: mail.nbusa.com From: "Michael Wimpee" To: Subject: kern.maxfiles guidelines Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2002 11:33:23 -0800 Organization: Natural Bodycare Message-ID: <001501c2b103$8194dc30$3c01010a@mwimpee> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook, Build 10.0.2627 Importance: Normal X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1106 X-Scanned-By: MIMEDefang 2.21 (www . roaringpenguin . com / mimedefang) Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hello, We have a 4.4-RELEASE server in production running primarily MySQL which, under extremely heavy loads, puts a lot of /kernel: file: table is full errors into the syslog. Newsgroup posts all seem to prescribe 'sysctl -w kern.maxfiles=[big number]', but I haven't seen any guidelines for the value of 'big'. Assume I get excited and do 'sysctl -w kern.maxfiles=9999999999'. What will happen as I open more and more files? Is there a formula for calculating good values of 'big' (eg, MB RAM * SQL_MAX_CONNECTIONS * Pi)? Or do I just keep increasing it until it's 'big enough'? Increasing the value (which I've done) indeed fixes the problem, but I've yet to see a rationale for the stated values people are using and there *must* be a reason for the defaults (anybody know what it is?). Thanks, Michael Wimpee Network Technician Natural Bodycare mwimpee@nbusa.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message